New achievements
Recently someone posted on Reddit about how he completed all the achievements in Basketball GM. In response to that, here are some new achievements!
New "Compare Players" feature
Having some convenient way to compare players is a very common feature request. For example, here is a post on Reddit from 2013 asking for it, to which I replied "That's a good idea. I'll add it to my list. Thanks!"
Well now it's off the todo list!
2023 traffic stats
Every year I post some traffic stats here. It's a fun tradition because the numbers keep going up. I'm sure that won't last forever, but it did for 2023. For the 11th consecutive year, my games have grown in popularity!
Total play time was 453 years. That means that every day, more than a year's worth of time was spent playing my games. Or another way to look at it is that, for the entire year, every second of every day, an average of 453 people were playing a ZenGM game.
Basketball GM is still by far my most popular game and grew the largest in absolute terms (number of users or amount of time played), but the small ones ZenGM Baseball and ZenGM Hockey grew at the fastest rate. Overall, play time increased by 15% over last year.
I am very grateful for the love and support you guys constantly show me. Thank you for helping ZenGM have yet another successful year!
2023 traffic stats:
5 new international teams, 3 new American teams, and 4 rebranded teams
Merry Christmas! My present to you: 12 new logos!
5 new international teams in Athens, Delhi, Istanbul, Lisbon, and Seoul.
3 new American teams: the Colombus Cardinals and Raleigh Red Wolves, which will appear in default leagues in ZenGM Hockey (replacing Cincinnati and Charlotte), and Providence Shoggoths, which will appear in historical BBGM leagues from 1947-1949 (replacing the Providence Blue Chips).
4 of the original 30 BBGM teams got new logos: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, and Detroit.
As always, thanks to users on Reddit and Discord for suggesting names and voting on them, even though I decided to overrule some of the results :)
Basketball game clock rewrite
The play-by-play in BBGM has always been a little weird. If you looked at it closely, you would notice some strange and unrealistic things related to the game clock. Today a bunch of that is fixed. Here's a list of some of the changes you might notice:
Play-by-play redesign
The new football drive charts made me think more about how ugly the live sim experience is in all of my games. One problem is that the play-by-play is pretty bad. Basically just plan text. Can I do better? I think so!
Here is my attempt at redesigning the play-by-play log for all of the sports:
Football GM drive chart during live sim
Big news for Football GM today - live game sim now shows a drive chart! By "drive chart" I mean a list of all the plays that have happened in this drive, drawn on top of a football field. Like this:
This makes it much easier to see what is happening while you watch a live game. It's so much better that it kind of feels dumb that it took me so long to add. But, well, it wasn't the easiest thing to do! So please let me know if you notice any bugs.
Groundhog Day improvements, including a "players only" option
Groundhog Day is a cool feature that lets you replay the same season over and over again. At the end of the playoffs, rather than proceeding to the draft and free agency, it just takes you directly to the next preseason. All player ratings, ages, injuries, and teams are reset to the same as they were the previous season. And you can just keep going as long as you want.
This is nice if you want to see what happens when a season is simulated multiple times. Like you can auto play 100 seasons and then see what the probability of each team winning a championship in that season is. You can also use it to replay the same season, like a challenge - what's the best I can do, given the same starting position?
The finances revamp made coaching and health spending too powerful
The finances revamp from a couple months ago went pretty smoothly. Old leagues got upgraded to the new system, the new system generally worked as intended, and people seemed to like it.
But after a little while, I got a bug report from someone claiming that progs are too large now, that something about the effect of coaching spending must be different.
My initial reaction was to not believe it. I mean, I wrote the code, I know how it works, I know it's supposed to not be literally exactly the same as before, but any difference should be so small you can't notice it. So I figured it was just some psychological trick, like you get particularly lucky/unlucky due to random chance, and then you assume it happened because of this other thing that you know happened. Perfectly normal. People do that all the time.
But I kept getting reports like this, maybe once per week. I became at least slightly concerned that this was a real bug.
Then I saw a comment by legendary BBGM user (and sometimes BBGM dev) nicidob saying he thinks something is wrong too.
TLDR: nicidob was actually wrong, the thing he noticed was just random variation. But everyone else was correct. There was indeed a bug that made coaching and health spending more powerful than they were previously. That is now fixed. Read on if you want the details.
11 new teams/logos, and an Australian relocation
Thank you to everyone on Reddit and Discord for suggesting names for new teams in some international cities. I got the usual logo designer (Elliott Strauss) to make the logos, and he just finished this week.
There was also some good timing. Right about when these logos were getting finished, a user (utmothgirl on Discord) sent me a fun logo for a team from Kentucky. That is included in this update too.
And as the title mentions, there was also a relocation in this update. Right after I released the last batch of logos, some Australian users informed me that the Melbourne Convicts was a bad name because Melbourne was actually settled by free people, not convicts. So in this batch, I moved the Convicts to Sydney (which was actually settled by convicts) and added a new team in Melbourne.
Here are all the new teams: